THE CROWD – "You'll Never Walk Alone"

I know the song but not this recording – I had left the UK to work on a summer camp in the US at this point so had become detached from the UK chart for a while – I’m not sure I can be bothered to check it out if I’m honest

I’d misfiled this in my head as a *Hillsborough* charity record – which would make a lot more sense with this song…

There was a video for this, as shown on Top Of The Pops. Its hard to come up with much of acommentry as I haven’t heard it since 1985, and its the type of record that Dale Winton would leave out of Pick Of The Pops. I’m always disproportionately interested to see anything that features Peter Cook though, though often only the once.

A few days after the Bradford fire came Heysel, which cast an extra pall over this record’a stay at the top. It wasn’t hard to look around and see doom and despair in the mid-eighties if you were of a pessimistic frame of mind.

The Bradford fire was of course news in my neck of the woods but this song wasn’t. Considered as a recording (which doesn’t seem fair when I couldn’t evaluate “Do They Know” apart from its circumstances, but there it is) it sounds out of place in 1985, and a surprisingly thin crowd, as Tom says. Mixing it with some actual recordings of crowds singing the song might have helped. No quibble with the score.

Took a bit of finding on YouTube, but there’s a fan-made video here.

Wikipedia says that “the music publishers of the record refused to waive their royalties, resulting in a much-reduced donation of £132,000”. Nice.

A lot of people think that Gerry Marsden wrote this song but it was, in fact, written by Rodgers and Hammerstein for the film ‘Carousel, a couple of decades before Gerry and his Pacemakers made the song their own. The scene in which the song features has the power to make grown men blub. I once cruelly put the film on and wound it forward to ‘that bit’ and the chap who was with me stopped talking and wept uncontrollably.

So the song had significant emotional power long before Gerry Marsden or the members of The Crowd got hold of it.

#8 Rory, I was going to bring up the subject of music publishing royalties on charity records.

Does anyone know the common practice?

Did Ure/Geldof benefit from Band Aid as song-writers? Or did their royalties go to famine relief? Did their (respective) music publishers waive their cut?

Ditto the writers/publishers of We Are The World.

If there is a different song, with the same or different composers on the B-Side, do they similarly give up their publishing income? And do their publishers do likewise?

I’m uneasy about the whole charity record thing.

Why is it appropriate for a bunch of musicians to react to every human tragedy newstory by cobbling together a record?

Why aren’t other bodies, notably the Government, co-ordinating the response?

by “here” i mean “round about 84-85”: geldof wasn’t involved on this particular record

anyway, my point is that geldof sees the pop structure as a quasi-punk route to politics by other means — i think this analysis is fraught with all kinds of peril in the material realisation, but it’s pretty easy to see why he was so frustrated with and disgusted and disappointed by “politics by non-other means” at this date

somewhere in the FT archives, there’s something i wrote about this in ref Live8 — but i couldn’t think of how to find it or google it… the stuff i thought i mentioned doesn’t seem to turn up0

The Bradford fire was without doubt the worst indictment of just how shabby UK football grounds had become by the eighties. As Enitharmon pointed out the Kings Cross fire occured not long after. Some might also recall the Stardust disco fire on 14th of February 1981 in my familys home city Dublin which claimed many young lives.
All these horrific fires were characterised by a lack of consideration in prior prevention (blocked exits, unsafe materials, ignored warnings
etc).
I won’t turn this into a fire safety lecture. I will just say that when the right-wing media whinges about ” Health-and-Safety Jobsworths ” part of me thinks are that media not just making a responsible job a bit harder for the people doing it? Another part of me thinks if only a few of those ” Jobsworths ” had been around 25 years ago.
Better a slightly over-cautious approach and a few disgruntled commentators than negligence and dozens of lost lives.

Apologies for my earlier post. I had clean forgotten that Gerry and the Pacemakers had gone to number one with this record and was therefore unaware that the song had already been explored on this site.

I should mention that I bought this version of the song, not because I was particularily fond of it but because I was an uncynical kid at the time and was buying any record that was serving what I considered to be a good cause(Although I couldn’t bring myself to buy ‘We Are The World’). So I also bought the Hear ‘N’ Aid record, Wham’s ‘Last Christmas’ and The Thompson Twins’s truly awful ‘Lay Your Hands On Me’ which some people have forgotten was also a charidee record. And I totally bought into the Live Aid thing, which I still think is a remarkable achievement, even if I had to endure watching Mick and David making themselves look like complete tits on what was surely the very worst record(And video) of the 80s.

Great site, by the way. I found it via the article in The Times and have recommended the site to several people who will, like me, appreciate its lack of snobbery and its informed opinions.

Yes, welcome Ludovic, and since I hadn’t read the Gerry and the Pacemakers convo myself, I found your post quite useful.

I assume that Stop The Violence Movement’s “Self Destruction” never got near to bothering the bunny, so I’ll just mention that there was a charity record with a truly catchy hook (though perhaps the hook made self destruction seem catchy itself).

Tom – some other names for you.

Phil Lynott (I think this was actually his last recording)
The Nolans
Jess Conrad (interesting fact about him – he appears as both an actor and a (different) character in “Telstar”)
Dave Lee Travis
Jim Diamond
Bruce Forsyth

The producer was Graham Gouldman

Marsden’s involvement came about because his manager at the time lived in Bradford and the original idea was to record with the players but they were too traumatised.

I remember that day we (the Mighty Dale) were playing Chesterfield away and they too were Champions of their division. Because we were going to be so heavily outnumbered I decided to watch from the main stand at Saltergate and recall noticing that the seats were wooden so it was eerie to hear news of the disaster when I got back.

I think we were virtually the last club to field a player from that ill-fated fixture when Neil Redfearn (who was playing for Lincoln that day) finished his career with us in 2003-04 although Stuart McCall might have made an appearance for Sheffield United the following season.

I know Bradfordians do feel their tragedy has been a bit forgotten compared to the others – I’ll avoid going down the Boris Johnson route here and say no more on that subject.

There is a bit of a war on youtube with the Yorkshire TV footage (supposedly only available for fire training) regularly appearing then disappearing.What always strikes me is how long it takes John Helm (from the other side of the ground) to realise it’s life-threatening. He’s making jocular remarks about it speeding up their renovation plans and it’s not until the poor old bloke on fire walks onto the pitch that he really twigs.By contrast there’s a local radio commentary from inside that stand (also on youtube) where you can hear the panic rising as he realises he himself isn’t safe. He survived and moved to Radio Trent where he was on hand for Hillsborough four years later.

Oh I don’t know, the “dead and wounded on either side” line seemed remarkably, if not scarily prescient (for someone who travelled through Kings Cross about twenty minutes before it happened).

I remember watching the aftermath of the Bradford City disaster as it happened, I think I remember either World Of Sport or Grandstand cutting to it (though I could be very wrong here – or thinking of Hillsborough). I have certainly seen it since, as the guy on my fire training course said ruefully, the only way it could be improved as a fire safety video would be to show the locked gates and turnstiles are the back of the ground. Horrific to watch, but hugely instructive of exactly how quickly a fire goes from “mild nuisance” to “deadly”.

the line up really is extraordinary isn’t it? extraordinary as in perculiar, not as in stellar. you can’t help feeling that ten years later bands would have been falling over themselves to be on a football-related charity record (not with cynical motives, neccessarily) and i get the feeling that ten years earlier there was also something of an affinity between pop and football too (though this is based mainly on a conflation in my mind between the look of seventies football fans and the bay city rollers, plus also rod stewart). was it just that football was *that* unfashionable in the 80s or was there a more fundamental split between the two? i can’t readily imagine duran/wham/spandau on the terraces (or the smiths or cocteau twins for that matter) but nowadays it would seem de rigeur for professional everymen like phil collins to passionate spurs fans, or whatever.

Re 26: Football was so reviled in the mid 80s that football supporters – no one else – were to be forced to carry id cards. Colin Moynihan was the weasel charged with getting it through, and almost did, before another tragedy – I think this idea was eventually shelved, never to be mentioned again, after Hillsborough.

You were made to feel like a pervert if you brought up football in the wrong company in the 80s. This lowpoint was also a handy excuse for businessman to buy up clubs, shut them down, and build houses on the grounds, with little public outcry.

I have to say it doesn’t bother me that people who previously didn’t like football got into it post-Italia 90. A couple of sound reasons:

1. The standard in the mid 80s (Graham Taylor’s Watford, the rise of Wimbledon, Cambridge’s forgotten surge to the edge of the top flight with uber-route one tactics) was pretty awful. Watch The Big Match Revisited for irrefutable proof.

2. Lots of people I know who were totally disillusioned by football for other reasons (violence, people like Ken Bates and Luton’s David Evans running the game) came back gradually in the nineties.

And there’s always non league if you don’t want a multiplex atmosphere! Though with less pop/football crossover, maybe.

Without wishing to be too cynical about the motivations involved (although it’s always tempting!), perhaps this provided the first opportunity for people who had been left on the sidelines during the Band Aid project to show that they were just as capable of grand philanthropic gestures as Geldof and Ure’s A-team. (And Marsden’s network of contacts would have been more old-school/showbiz/light entertainment in any case.)

This was already a relatively high-profile period for Marsden. “Ferry Cross The Mersey” had been on the B-side of “Relax” – making this the second Pacemakers track to top the charts in 18 months – and there had been some recent excitement over the possibility of Frankie Goes To Hollywood overturning the record set by the Pacemakers, whose first three singles had all reached Number One. (As it turned out, “Welcome To The Pleasuredome” stalled at Number Two. leaving Marsden’s record unbettered.) With that in mind, you could argue that it was to Marsden’s credit that he seized his moment, using his comparatively renewed public standing to charitable effect…

#27. yes, i am pretty much that person too. as you say, a couple of great opportunities to discuss anon.

#28 there was an i ludicrous song ‘moynihan brings out the hooligan in me’, though that would have been a few years later i think.

one thing that’s just occurred to me. who did the beatles support? liverpool is the world’s most passionate football city, the kop sang ‘she loves you’ etc, etc, so how come i’ve never read about any of them ever saying a single thing about football, or even being asked about it, or placed in a football context by other people? it suggests myths not quite matching reality somewhere along the line. mind you, according to those dominic sandbrook books the second most popular sport in the uk during the nineteen sixties was……speedway! and i’ve no idea who procul harem’s favourite riders were.

As someone who has no interest in football, I quite liked the 80s-music-scene’s rejection of it. Being at secondary school at that time, it seemed as if there was dogmatic line, diving the two – which suited me fine. I’m sure, if I’d looked a little closer, I’d probably have spotted a few football fans hidden amongst my music-loving friends, but I didn’t and so was shocked and felt a little betrayed when I went to a Glastonbury in the nineties, and half-the-crowd cleared off to watch England versus someone in the Euro-96 on big screens rather than see Earl-Brutus/Faithless/The-Supernaturals/whoever I was watching.

#35, although I’m fairly sure Gerry’s sixth and seventh must have done better than the no 19 and no 28 that Warriors Of The Wasteland and Watching The Wildlife managed 🙂

Re 34: Apparently McCartney was/is an Everton fan and was spotted at the 1968 Cup Final.

#38 That is half correct. They made 24 and 8 (Ferry Cross The Mersey actually) respectively.

#32-3 It’s interesting that in politics at this time the exact reverse was happening with middle-class wankers like Hodge, Mullin and Tatchell trying to prise the oldschool trade unionists (Reg Prentice, Michael O Halloran, Eddie Milne) out of their seats.

Re: the upper middle classes, football and the ’80s.

I went to two fairly famous private schools during the late ’80s. At the first, in London, being into football was more common than not, although not a particularly tribal thing, with affliation being spread between the London clubs, and I don’t ever remember being challenged as to where my loyalties lay.

At the second, very much not in London, I don’t ever recall football coming up in general conversation. There was one boy who – rather eccentrically, it was considered – went to every Swindon Town home game, and used to ring the local radio phone-in show to defend the reputation of football fans. His best friend, who came from a very famous family, was a QPR fan, and would get the driver to whisk him along to Loftus Road during the holidays.

Football/fashion? I remember hearing the score of the 1988 cup final from a bloke running a stall at Kesington Market.

I think I would have been too scared to go to a match in the ’80s.

# 46 When you support a team in the bottom division (35 years and counting) such notions of fashionability don’t have the same resonance. I did notice in the early 90s we seemed to attract more students than hitherto and kept a good fanzine going for most of the decade until the staff was pinched wholesale for the club programme.
Unfortunately this was all lost in the gloom and despondency of Graham Barrow’s reign. Wigan (sorry to mention them) beware !

#40 hmm. a bit of googling reveals a lot of scepticism about macca being a toffee. and a nicely obtuse answer from george “there are three teams in liverpool and i prefer the other one”.

#46 that glastonbury story is a real window into a lost world. i can sort of see, and sympathise with, how you can get yourself into the position that to want england to beat argentina at football, or to want any sort of sucess at anything, is to align yourself with thatcher, but it’s pretty self defeating. but the nineties will give us plenty of occasions to explore the unravelling of all this, and that’s no bed of roses either.